Ukraine Asks Tether to Halt All Transactions With Russians; Tether Demurs
The vice prime minister of the embattled country has made similar requests with a number of western companies as well as major crypto exchanges.
Mar 11, 2022 at 10:35 p.m. UTCUpdated May 11, 2023 at 5:59 p.m. UTC
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Appealing directly to both stablecoin issuert Tether and Chief Technology Officer Paolo Ardoino via Twitter, Ukraine Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov urged the company on Friday to stop all dealings with Russians.
- While not responding directly to Fedorov, the company in a statement to CoinDesk said, "Tether conducts constant market monitoring to ensure that there are no irregular movements or measures that might be in contravention of international sanctions."
- The policy appears to be in line with that of crypto exchanges including Coinbase (COIN) and Kraken, both of which also declined requests to cut off all Russian accounts, but promised not to allow any skirting of sanctions imposed by the West.
- Since the Russian invasion in late February, Ukrainians have been paying a steep premium over the value of the U.S. dollar for Tether's USDT stablecoin, to which it is supposed to be pegged 1:1, on the local cryptocurrency exchange Kuna.
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UPDATE (March 11 22:44): Adds the last paragraph.
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Stephen Alpher is CoinDesk's managing editor for Markets. He holds BTC above CoinDesk’s disclosure threshold of $1,000.